Growth is a natural instinctual need. Scientists have discovered that when a person learns something new, this creates excretion of endomorphines and other positively reinforcing chemicals in brain. Learning brings pleasure, when it is natural and not connected to fear of rejection and failure.

But there are yet other motives for action and growth, and these are love and need for creativity. We need to love and to create, just as we need to sleep and eat. These are basic needs, even if they are higher on need-hierarchy scale.

Thus, even if we do not have self-rejection or dissatisfaction as a motivating force, we will always have love and creativity as motivating forces to grow, create and produce.

Let us grow naturally without fear or self-doubt.

We are all in first grade of school of spiritual growth.

But we need to prepare ourselves to be in second grade next year, and third year after and ?..

(Adapted from "The Psychology of Happiness" by Robert Najemy available at http://www.Amazon.com and http://www.HolisticHarmony.com. This book and other writings can be viewed at http://www.HolisticHarmony.com where you can also download FREE articles and e-books.)

Let us then imagine that our and others? personalities are half-finished paintings. Let us perceive general state of society and world around as a painting in progress.

Yes, there are many weaknesses, faults and aspects to be improved in those paintings. But they are what they can and should be for their incomplete stage. A painting must pass through a series of stages until it is finally completed. Each of these stages is a perfect part of that process of completion. No stage could be skipped or avoided.

Thus, we and those around us are "perfect" at every stage of that process of completion. We and everything around us is at a stage in process of perfection. Even our imperfections are a perfect temporary part of our movement towards perfection.

When we perceive ourselves and others as unfinished paintings, we will have patience and understanding for our mutual weaknesses and faults. We will perceive them as parts of our being which need to be worked on in process of manifesting our perfect being, which is waiting latent within us to become a reality.

The same of course holds for those around us who are in a process of perfecting their unfinished paintings.

The Bud and Flower

A flower bud does not yet manifest its latent beauty. Yet we do not reject, criticize or condemn it. We realize that it is in a process and that it is what it needs to be now in order to become flower which it is destined to be. We accept it is as it is and wait patiently for its blossoming.

In same way we need to perceive ourselves and others as:

1. Paintings in process of completing ourselves. 2. Buds becoming flowers 3. Souls in process of evolution.

We all deserve love and respect exactly as we are.

Our life purpose, however, is to attend to process of evolution and self-perfection until we blossom into magnificent and totally conscientious and loving beings that we are destined to be.

(Adapted from "The Psychology of Happiness" by Robert Najemy available at http://www.Amazon.com and http://www.HolisticHarmony.com. This book and other writings can be viewed at http://www.HolisticHarmony.com where you can also download FREE articles and e-books.)